warbastard

While I agree with your point that computers should do the most they can to take the work out of things for the user, the flight search example used in the article is exactly the sort of thing that at some point you're likely to need to input. It's a plan that the user has that they want to action. While you could use voice recognition or call a person to do the same, some people are probably going to want to type it into a flight search or calendar app or similar, so the GUI for that is necessary.

"Making rounded corners and gradients is easier than making something useful. that's why it gets so much attention"

It's not about it being easier, it's about making it obvious that the user can use it. Following established design conventions for buttons by gradating backgrounds or rounding borders, however right or wrong they may be, can help a user to know the intention behind something without needing to think about it.

Depending on the length of the list, if you need to encourage correct spelling and have a list where the user knows the answer without needing to look at all the options (eg a country) then typeahead (autocomplete) functionality can work well here.

Yes, PayPal and other similar services were invented.

"I actually learned a few tricks from my colleague who has a great Photoshop workflow, and Photoshop really can be whipped into shape…"

I'd love to hear more about this. Do you have any links describing some of the tricks you and your colleague used to improve your Photoshop workflow?

Yes, D3 uses SVG

Same here. I voted twice, once for Regular and once for Heavy as I guess I could be classified as both

My father also runs one of these to help people learn Photoshop (mainly for editing family photos). It's surprising the topics that can be learned though these groups

I did this and it worked for me. I taught myself design after finishing a code-heavy computer science degree. I learned how to use Photoshop quite quickly along with some design theory but it took time to get really good.

I used to look at those sites that were popular a few years ago that list well designed websites, and take inspiration from one or several of them at a time by combining the elements to create a new design.

It helped that I was working for a company that wanted a new design created to a brief each week as it helped me to get better quite fast.

Reading a lot of design, UI and UX blogs to understand why things worked was crucial to my development too.

In the UK I believe a good amount of people do keep eggs in the fridge when they get them home from the supermarket. Like yours, our fridges have the plastic containers for eggs.

Exactly the same problem for me. It's hard to save when your partner doesn't want to do it for various reasons

While in England, the delivery bots would work 2 weeks a year.